The steady delivery of new and updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases continues today with the immediate availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9. This release follows on the heels of the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 in January, and the delivery of the newest major version of the platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, released in November 2010. Red Hat delivers updates to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 and 6 platforms to enable choice and stability for customers and their unique deployment needs through the lifecycle of each release.

With the availability of 4.9, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 platform, first released in 2005, now transitions into its third lifecycle phase – Production 3. During the Production 3 phase, systems continue to receive security and bug fixes, but the introduction of new features and hardware support, which is provided in earlier phases, ceases. Customers wishing to continue using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 beyond Production 3 and its end-of-life date of February 29, 2012 should review Red Hat’s Extended Lifecycle Support options. And, of course, subscription customers may upgrade their systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or 6 at any time for no additional fee.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9 update provides resolutions for approximately 200 issues covering a number of components, including the kernel, the shell environment, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and NFS filesystem. Also included in the update is a refresh of SystemTap kernel tracing capabilities, with additional example scripts and listing modes that allow kernel probe points to be listed.